[Former Treasury Secretary Larry] Summers, who backed up the Tax Policy Center’s analysis that found the math of the Romney plan to be impossible, said the tax plan was the “daughter of voodoo economics,” riffing off the term George H.W. Bush used to describe Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economic policies:

SUMMERS: I’ve seen it where if you really parse the arithmetic closely and imagined what the CBO would do, the challenger’s errors were in the tens of billions of dollars. I’ve seen it where if you really parsed the errors, the challenger’s errors were in the hundreds of billions of dollars. This is the first time the challenger’s errors, on my accounting, have been measured in the trillions of dollars. This is daughter of voodoo economics.

It’s easy to say that my plan is to eat ice cream sundaes and chocolate cake and hamburgers as much as I want. My plan is to lose 60 pounds. And my plan is to avoid painful exercise. And those are all my objectives and I’m committed to every one of them. You can do that, but it isn’t likely to get you — you don’t know quite where to go if you’ve got all three of those objectives.

I think what’s important to recognize, and I think what the nature of political discourse tends to lead one not to see, is that we’re sort of in uncharted territory of being wrong.